Write a critical review of Andre Breton's 'Nadja' (1928) and how it sheds light on his vision of surrealism, woman and the city of Paris.

Despite its apparent simplicity this structure is conditioned by Breton’s vision of surrealist phenomena.  His role as the protagonist and narrator of this voyage of ‘self-discovery’ has strong precedents in the literature of the imagination.  Attacking the poverty of narrative and descriptive writing (clearly identified in his first two manifestoes) he champions the work of Rimbaud, Lautrémont and Huysmans who most of all exemplified ‘this great victory of the involuntary over the ravaged domain of conscious possibilities’.  Ambiguity, uncertainty, the implication of things unknown, these are the concepts that Breton wishes to convey to his audience.  His only interested is in ‘books left ajar, like doors;’ with no beginning, middle or end (though paradoxically such concepts are discernable in Nadja) and the transparency of his own personal experience:

‘I myself shall continue living in my glass house where you can always see who comes to call; where everything hanging from the ceiling and on the walls stays where it is as if by magic, where I sleep nights in a glass bed, under glass sheets, where who I am will sooner or later appear etched by a diamond’ 

Moving from literary precedents to visual ones, Breton confirms the surrealist’s admiration for the metaphysical painting of Giorgio de’Chirico (1888-1978).  His depictions of deserted, nightmarish, cityscapes ‘populated’ by antique statues, juxtaposed with symbolic architecture and objects of modernity (trains, ships and chimneys), resemble closely the Freudian dream imagery that Breton appropriated for his movement.  De’Chirico’s motivation for painting in this way, ‘the entire enigma of revelation’, was attributed by him to surprise, and it was surprise, objective chance or coincidence that was a cornerstone of Breton’s surrealist thought.

What concerns Breton is not his ‘organic’ life but those ‘decisive episodes’ which are part of his unconscious journey, where he is at ‘the mercy of chance – the merest as well as the greatest – temporarily escaping my control, admitting me to an almost forbidden world of sudden parallels, petrifying coincidences’.  This attitude toward everyday life and its potential ‘strangeness’ is at the heart of Breton’s conception of ‘marvellous chance’ – throughout the book he attempts to demonstrate the deterministic value of fortuitous chance, through his interaction with Nadja and the cityscape of Paris.  In what is almost a pseudo-scientific experiment his purpose is nothing less than a re-evaluation of reality, the understanding of the interrelationship between an interior reality (the unconscious) and that exterior reality manifested in the chance experiences of our daily lives.  Breton recognises that the very nature of his enterprise prevents true scientific exposition, ‘Do not expect me to provide an exact account of what I have been permitted to experience in this domain’, yet his subsequent text, at least until his chance encounter with Nadja, combines factual narrative description and the introduction of various ‘real’ characters, with a multiplicity of coincidences and chance events.

At the Conservatoire Renée Maubel for a performance of Apollinaire’s Couleur du Tenps (talking with Picasso, an icon of the early surrealist movement) he is mistaken for a dead friend of Paul Eluard (a later adherent to the movement), in the street he meets a girl who recites his favourite poem, Dormeur du Val by Rimbaud, and at the flea market at St. Ouen (an important source for ‘symbolic’ surrealist objects) a stallholder ‘quite spontaneously’ mentions the surrealists and Louis Aragon’s Paysan de Paris.  Benjamin Peret, Marcel Duchamp (in the context of his ability to ‘play on words’ (e.g. Rrose Selavy) – a technique much used by Breton) and Robert Desnos are all introduced into the narrative in this coincidental manner.  Desnos with his automatic writing where ‘he “dozes” but he writes, he talks’ is for Breton the epitome of his surrealist credo (Plate 7., a photograph taken by Man Ray, even illustrates his self-induced hypnotic state), creating the dream-like state necessary to ‘liberate’ the unconscious mind.  Reminding us of his predilection for urban strolling (Baudelaire’s flaneûr) Breton continues by describing his aimless wanderings that culminate in a clear reference to his future chance encounter with Nadja.

Thereafter, until Nadja makes her appearance, Breton focuses on communicating to the reader the importance of Freudian analytical techniques, particularly his interpretation of dreams and its associated symbolism.  His lengthy exposition of Blanche Derval’s role in Les Detraquées, closely resembles Freud’s description and analysis of dreams in his key work The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) – there is even a strong reference to a specific series of dreams where a ‘dead child in a box’ (in this case the cupboard) was a critical element.  Such symbolism is also evident in Lisa Deharme’s glove (the original sky-blue one and the bronze ‘replica’ presented to the Surrealiste Centrale).  For Breton the explicit meaning is the incongruity or uncertainty of expectation, the play between reality and representation, weight and weightlessness.  At the unconscious level Freudian dream symbolism associates the gloved ‘object’ with the occult, palmistry, sexual caress and masturbation (alluding perhaps to the psychic and sexual role of women in the surrealist world).  The reappearance of this motif, in Nadja’s ‘drawings’ (plate 32) and her vision of a flaming hand on the surface of the Seine, adds some logical coherence to this interpretation of Breton’s narrative.  

Breton is not averse to borrowing from his literary heroes when it suits his surrealist voyage of self-discovery.  From Baudelaire he borrows the concepts of magic and the marvellous in the urban fabric of Paris; ‘the life of our city is rich in poetic and marvellous subjects.  We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvellous’.  It is hardly surprising then that Breton’s encounter with Nadja echoes Baudelaire’s poem To a Passer by, ‘And I drank, trembling as a madman thrills, from her eyes, ashen sky where brooded storm, the softness that fascinates, the pleasure that kills’.  What differs, despite any similar premonitions, is that Breton does not walk away – he makes direct acquaintance ‘without a moments hesitation’ with a woman that ‘looked so delicate she scarcely seemed to touch the ground as she walked.’  This ghostly, almost ethereal description, identifies Nadja as a mysterious figure, a ‘soul in limbo’, who Breton portrays, in the course of his meetings with her, as the literal embodiment of his surrealist woman.  His characterisation of Nadja conflates the essential aspects of surrealist thought; desire and eroticism, chance and shock (or ‘petrifying coincidence’), myth and magic.   A young, almost child-like (Freud’s femme-enfant) psychotic woman with clear hysterical tendencies (important in the early development of psychoanalysis) is transformed before the reader’s eyes into a prescient and erotic embodiment of Breton’s surrealist ideology.  Using a combination of chance events (e.g. their ‘profane’ kiss and Aragon’s postcard, the mutual visualization of the fountain, the black window turning to red, and their unplanned ‘surprise’ encounters), enigmatic, multi-layered dialogue (‘I am the thought on the bath in the room without mirrors’) and visual imagery (Nadja’s drawings, her learned references to extant surrealist paintings and the orientating urban photography) Breton creates the ultimate surrealist dream.

He shatters this dream, this emblematic transformation of woman to surrealist symbol, when he finally has sex with Nadja.  From this point disenchantment begins, ‘for sometime, I had stopped understanding Nadja, Actually, perhaps we have never understood one another’.  His infatuation fades and Nadja’s incipient madness, which Breton characterized as an escape from the ‘hateful prison of logic’, overwhelms her (in the form of visual and olfactory hallucinations) with her consequent admission to an asylum.  Despite his tirade against the psychiatric profession (Freud excepted) in the closing page of the second section, he never visited or asked after Nadja’s during this incarceration, a failure symptomatic of what Nadja actually represented for Breton.  She was a canvas, a combination of manipulable body and psychic mind, on which he could project his own surrealist inspiration and desire.  It was only when he felt threatened by her descent into madness that he backed way from the woman whose charm and mystery first attracted him to this ‘clinical’ investigation of the unconscious mind.  As Jack Spector has observed this essentially egotistical use of woman characterizes the surrealist’s attitude to women, ‘These roles were useful for male creators who spilled much ink and semen in their passionate quest of (mainly) Parisian woman.’.  As Breton commented later when discussing his Parisian wanderings, ‘The unexpected encounter which always tends, whether explicitly or not, to take the features of the woman, marks the culmination of this quest.’.  For Breton and the surrealists  ‘woman’ was a passive ‘communicating vessel’ (the seer or medium – frequently mentioned in Nadja), an ‘other’ that inspired their imagination and voyages of ‘self-discovery’.  

   

As already intimated Breton’s vision of the ‘surrealist’ Paris owed much to the legacy of Charles Baudelaire.  In his essay ‘De l’heroisme de la vie moderne’ (Chapter VIII of his 1846 Salon review) Baudelaire identifies the importance of the modern urban environment:

   

 ‘the spectacle of high life and of the thousands of floating existences which only circulate in the underworld of the big city – criminals and kept women – we have only to open our eyes to see our heroism [….] Parisian life is fertile in poetic and magical subjects.  The magical surrounds us and sustains as like the atmosphere; but we do not see it’

These ideas re-emerged in Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life (1863) with its central themes of the flaneûr (or urban stroller), chance meetings with passers by, the shattering of the self (its multiplication and ‘communion’ with others), and the importance of the crowd.   Breton builds on this legacy investing place names and public spaces with private, mysterious meanings (echoing De’ Chirico’s  ‘apparition of statues unknown to us on deserted squares where the sun casts their shadows’) as he wanders around the Paris cityscape.  The statue of Etienne Dolet in the Place Maubert induces an unbearable discomfort, the Port Saint-Denis is considered ‘extremely handsome’ and ‘extremely useless’ and the Place Dauphin offers an ‘insistent embrace’.  Connecting these disparate sites, which usually signify important points of juncture or significance in Breton’s narrative, is the network of Grand Boulevards that are the lifeblood of the flaneûr.  As if seeking to enhance the ‘clinical’ authenticity of his experiences with Nadja Breton documents all these Parisian sites with extensive textual and photograph descriptions, providing a factual account at odds with the ‘dream-like’ emphasis of his fleeting relationship with Nadja.  It is as if Breton is trying to anchor and thereby recall his ‘ethereal’ surrealist vision, with Nadja at its vortex, in a framework that is the physical fabric of the city of Paris.

Polizzotti, a respected biographer of Andre Breton, maintains that Nadja ‘with its blend of intimate confession and sense of the marvellous’ is the ‘quintessential Surrealist romance’.  It certainly embodies the key notions of his surrealist vision but a love story or romance, it cannot be.  Breton was a predatory male prowling the Grand Boulevards and back streets or alleyways of modern Paris.  On the rebound from one relationship, his search for a chance sexual encounter with another woman culminated in his few short weeks with Nadja, a vunerable, psychotic, woman on the edge of madness.  Projecting onto her his surrealist vision he was surely largely responsible for ‘coaxing her incipient madness beyond the limit’.  When madness overcome her he quickly withdrew, moving on to the next relationship is his voyage of ‘self-discovery’.  What emerges from this analysis is a less than flattering autobiographical portrait of Breton, perhaps not quite the answer he sought when posing the question ‘Who am I?’.    

Bibliography

Breton. A., ‘Surrealist Manifesto (1924)’, Manifestoes of Surrealism, Arbor, New York, 1969.

Breton. A.,, Nadja, (trans. R. Howard), Introduction by M. Polizzotti, Penguin, London, 1999.

C. Baudelaire, Art in Paris 1845-1862:Salons and other Exhibitions (Trans. & Ed. J. Mayne), Phaidon, Oxford, 1965.

Rosemont. F., (ed.), What is Surrealism?, Selected writings of Andre Breton, London, 1936; 1978.

Spector. J. J., Surrealist Art and Writing 1991/39: The Gold of Time, CUP, 1997.

           

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